No New Land

by M G Vassanji

  Nurdin watched this infatuation with a twinge of envy: what dreams you dream when they are babies. But how can you feel jealous of an educated, respectable young man taking your children under his wing? He was like a younger brother – and don’t all children fall in love with their uncles? That was Zera’s opinion, and she must be right. Better this than the wrong kind of influence. Drugs and what-not.

  And hadn’t they taken him in, Nurdin could have argued with himself. So much so as even to try and find him a wife. “Why not get married?” Zera once said, making it sound like a good idea just come to mind. “No,” he replied, “no marriage for me,” and received the full vocal support of Fatima. Zera was not satisfied. “It is not possible,” she said. “There must be someone, there must be something.” She broached the subject with Jamal: “What if I introduce a nice girl to your friend? Educated, you know, but not too much. Plain, like him.” “Cool it,” said Jamal. “You’ll kill him. Besides” – he let drop – “there is someone in New York.”

  From then on, in Nanji’s presence, Zera would make teasing remarks about New York, and he would blush. “It’s not that simple …” he would begin.

  7

  “When does a man begin to rot?” Gazing at the distant CN Tower blinking its signals into the hazy darkness, Nurdin asked himself the question. He sat in his armchair, turned around to look out into the night. Through the open balcony the zoom of the traffic down below in the valley was faintly audible, as was the rustle of trees. Pleased with the sound of his silent question, he repeated it in his mind again, this time addressing the tower. The lofty structure he had grown familiar with over the months, from this vantage point, and he had taken to addressing it. “When does a man begin to rot?” he asked. Faithful always, it blinked its answer, a coded message he could not understand.

  He liked to keep the room darkened when alone. Somewhat vaguely he was aware of the photograph on the wall, on his right. Vaguely, because he rarely looked at it, and when he did, by accident, he tried as much as possible to block his father’s face on it from his mind. Something had changed, he did not know what, perhaps new ideas, like the question he was asking, not knowing why. Some inner reserve was creaking, shifting its weight. The photograph on the wall, its face, intruded into his consciousness at this moment, eyes boring into him from the side, and he shuddered.

  His father’s photograph, taken in the 1940s, was one of the prized possessions Zera had brought from Dar. Other things had seen the dustbins – photographs, old books, souvenirs – but not this. It was the first object to go up on the walls. Sometimes when she lighted incense sticks and went around the apartment consecrating it, she would stand before the photograph and hold the incense to it – as one would to a real person – thus giving it a real presence in the home. The fez on the small head, the bushy eyebrows, the hard eyes, the small mouth: relentless in judgement here as the real person had been in Africa.

  “Do you have lewd thoughts?” he asked Nanji one evening. Nanji had squirmed and grunted, and Nurdin pressed on: “No, seriously.” Then from the kitchen had come Zera’s “Be ashamed of yourself, Nurdin,” saving Nanji’s day.

  What did the younger man see in him, he had often wondered. The answer was close at hand: a simpleton, one to bear life’s drudgeries. Truth to tell, this was not far from his own estimation of himself, but he would have added “good-natured.” He was shrewd enough, he thought, to know what was what; he just lacked that something that would take him far, in business, for example. He had never had it, he accepted that, and he had let his father arrange his life for him, even though he had had inklings of what he really might have liked. It had been simple, life in the family, the community, so long as you did not question it. Few did; it was not worth the trouble, brought you nothing. There were a few accepted paths to take, and that was that. Somehow or other you fitted in, with your strengths and your weaknesses. And before you knew it you were worrying about your children, and after that, the fate of your soul in the first life, as it was called.

  Barring a few phantoms of thoughts, he had been satisfied. But now he felt tremors of change inside him, and new yearnings.

  He had seen much of Nanji recently, had toyed with the idea of sitting down with him, having a serious discussion, perhaps bare his soul, show the rot setting in. He didn’t have the courage for that. He didn’t have the words for it, the right approach.

  What do they know of our weaknesses, these youngsters, so surefooted in their rarefied world … seeing us solid as rocks – and as dumb. When all the time there exist thoughts, lurk desires inside you which you dare not look at, making lewd gestures at you to catch attention and you walk away, heart beating like a shy schoolgirl.… Only now all the murk there threatens to surface and the rock threatens to fall apart.

  Perhaps he would rot physically first. He felt tired these days, old. His hair had greyed and thinned, there were lines on his face, and his skin somehow looked more opaque in the mirror. How old was he? Forty-six, about the average life expectancy where he was born, but here in Canada you got an extended lease on life.

  The closest Nurdin found to a sales job since he was turned down for the position in Eatons’ shoe department was the midnight shift at a donut store on Spadina Avenue. What had made him expect a sales job – “something managerial,” he had said to Zera – in these dismal hours he could never after understand. Desperation, bluster … he had stated his knowledge of accounts on the application form, and the man who took it from him had looked suitably impressed.

  It was a disaster from his first step inside. He found himself working under a tough-looking elderly woman who answered his shy grin with a crusty “Go inside and put on a jacket.” And as he came to the counter wearing the yellow jacket, feeling a little low and degraded in this uniform that was stiff and odorous with the sweat of previous wearers, he was handed a ball of wet cloth and told to wipe the tables. A girl, rather pretty, also worked there. She liked him even less. November cold had driven idlers inside and the place was crowded; smoke and vapour saturated the air, together with odours of cream, stale donuts, and cigarette stubs; a group of permanent-looking hangers-on sat at a few tables, discussing vigorously what must surely have been politics, in a foreign language over foreign-looking newspapers. East Europeans, he gathered, having heard that there were many in Toronto. The girl apparently was also one of them.

  Nurdin soon realized that the two women regarded him as nothing more than a servant, keeping him as far as possible from the counter where they sat chatting when not serving. This was not the job he’d come for. He debated over and over with himself whether to stay the shift or go back home, but without resolution until the showdown came when the woman asked him to take the mop. He refused. He simply took a cup of coffee, picked up a plain donut, and sat down.

  The woman came and stood in front of him. “All right,” she said. “Scram before I call the cops.” Nurdin looked at her. “You’ve not paid for these,” she said. He stood up and left.

  It was cold and windy outside, and miserably he realized that the subways must have already stopped for the night. He walked up to Bloor Street, looking for another place to go in and sit. He found that he still had on the uniform jacket of the donut store. He did not have the heart to throw it away, so he folded it and placed it outside a building entrance. Fortunately there was another donut store two blocks away on Bloor. The girl there eyed him but let him stay. Later on, with very few customers present, she came and placed a cup of coffee in front of him, and still later a magazine called The Real Truth. He glared at it between the snatches of sleep he couldn’t resist as he waited out the night. When daylight came, he went out, after shaking the girl awake to say his thanks (to which she merely nodded sleepily), and took the subway home.

  He had tried out as a temporary security guard. Surely nothing more than a watchman, he admitted, but still. His first assignment was at a new building in Scarborough where not a bus passed by. When, after a walk of
half an hour from the nearest bus stop, he arrived two hours late, there was somebody else present, a tall handsome Asian man with a moustache, who treated him no better than a thief. And so, a long walk back to the bus stop.

  Even as a lowly parking-lot attendant he had had no luck. After only a few months he was summarily dismissed one evening, together with all the other attendants, by a supervisor who told him, “You are either dumb or too clever. Either way I don’t want you.” Only at the A-T gathering in the lobby of Sixty-nine, when he told them, “I say, the strangest thing …” was it explained to him how one could make extra money as a parking-lot attendant and how not to get caught.

  The A-T was of course a regular source of information on employment and immigration. Nurdin was told there how he could get a job as subway-car cleaner at night, working with some of the other fellows of Sixty-nine. The job was easy. You just did a few cars and then found an isolated one where you played cards for the remainder of the night. How do you get such a job? You simply had to “oil the hands” of the supervisor. “What-what?” he said, incredulous. “Here? In Canada?” “Tell him, Uncle,” someone said. And they all turned to look at the man they called Uncle, a stout, elderly former businessman, who spoke the wisdom of experience. “Yes. Just give your first week’s salary.”

  Notch by notch it seemed to Nurdin he had come down in self-esteem and expectation, grasping whatever odd job came his way, becoming a menial in the process. Back home even your glass of water was brought by a servant. A servant to fetch you from school, to hold your bag. Things had changed there, of course, but not that much. And now, here. In Canada. He had carried cases on his back the likes of which he would have thought he could not even move an inch; he had pressed trousers, cooked french fries, swept and mopped floors. You could weep. But the children wanted a car, a brand-new Chevy, to go to Wasaga Beach, Niagara Falls, Buffalo. And mosque, how could you go by bus to mosque: where all comparisons begin and end, where your real worth is measured. When did you arrive? You tell them. What work do you do? And you’re crushed, what to tell them. All the while newcomers, younger people, find jobs, success stories proliferate, bus and subway drivers in uniforms – men you thought no better than you – haughtily stare you down, prouder than doctors and accountants with cute kids and expensive wives. But whatever job you did you had to show the basics, the stars earned in this new country.

  8

  On the dark green wall behind the plaster goddess in the lobby of Sixty-nine there used to hang two large paintings in garish colours, in crude wooden frames that could have been the product of a beginner at a prison workshop. Both were the work of one hand, even a casual observer could have noted that. Vague human figures, in what looked like kneeling positions in one of them; in the other a person with arms stretched out as if crucified or simply flying; masks looked on at whatever tragedy was going on, and everything merged into a background done in coarse strokes in colours that could have been inspired by the leaden green of the wall. If they had not been obtained without cost, they would not have been there. But one morning the residents emerging from the elevators on their way out noticed that the paintings were gone. Two great rectangular patches marked the places they had occupied. It was surmised that they had been taken the previous night. Who would steal those dark paintings whose absence was now so strongly felt that complaints had even gone to the superintendent? There was a report by some of the ladies who go to mosque at five in the morning that the super himself had overseen their removal in the small hours of dawn. There the matter rested.

  These paintings were the work of a resident who had since left. Why they came to be done can be traced to a single incident in the recent history of this once stolid city which was now feeling its own winds of change.

  At 8:20 one spring evening, Nanji had given his class their midterm test, and now stood with the test papers in one hand at the streetcar stop on the corner of College and St. George streets. Characteristically, head lowered, shoulders sagging, he was thinking of one student in particular. A big-bosomed tall girl with remarkably distinguished features – aristocratic was the word that came to mind. Patrician. Why aristocratic – is there such a thing? Nothing plain about that face – notice she uses no makeup, nothing obvious – it could have come, that face, from a long line of careful breeding. A high, prominent forehead; every feature on that face distinct and prized; smooth skin. Flawless. And the long gold-brown hair. There was a casualness to her clothes that was studied, expensive, there was that ease in her manner, an assurance, that suggested security. A secure past and a secure future. She had a way of making herself noticed, he had observed, by coming to him and asking questions, however trivial, and being satisfied by whatever he said. Not a stupid girl, because some of the questions were sharp. A girl like her, nothing can go wrong with her, In a few years she’ll be in Rosedale, running respectable charities, wife of a Bay Street executive. Would this one, so friendly and deferential now, calling him “professor” and “sir,” even notice or acknowledge him then … and if she did, on what terms?

  His students calling him “sir” and coming around him to ask questions after class had Jamal simply bowled over one evening. Jamal had come in to town with him on some pretext and then hung around him, making it impossible for him to gather his thoughts before class. And then, as he gave his lecture, Jamal sat in, high above in the last corner seat, drawing attention every conceivable way. He was irrepressible, a comic foil to Nanji’s high seriousness. He would look deeply interested, apparently hanging on to every word of the professor, and then sit back to grin at him familiarly, as if to say, “Ah, my friend, how good you look! How far you’ve come!” Once he exclaimed, quite audibly, “Ah!” so as not to let a fine point escape his approval or the notice of everyone else present. Jamal might as well have been sitting at a qawali recital, where such outbursts of approval are appreciated. Nanji could have exploded with frustration. And finally, as if that was not enough, on two occasions Jamal even attempted to start a discussion: “I can see that, sir, but don’t you think in the Bantu languages you have an exception there … because of the long isolation,” looking tremendously earnest and talking completely out of context. After the lecture Nanji told him, “Never again.” But Jamal had been impressed, and it was good to have impressed him, because Jamal would go far.

  Nanji was smiling grimly at his own cynicism when the streetcar arrived. He got in and remained seated alone all the way, even when most of the seats were taken and some passengers stood. This happened often to him. Racism, the word kept intruding into his mind and he kept pushing it back. On what basis racism? It could be my face, dark, brooding, scowling, cratered. Perhaps I look like a bum. Professor Nanji? What we have become: suspecting racism, but never certain, touchy as a raw wound, blaming innocent people and letting the guilty walk smugly away because you can never be quick enough with a reply. Feeling angry and frustrated afterwards. I should have said this, if only I had said it … the next time.…

  He got off at the College subway station. Inside, he stood by himself on the dimly lighted platform, well away from the draft of the staircase. The trains were slow that evening, a fair number of people had collected on the platform. Later he would not be able to remember what he had been thinking of, waiting those first few minutes for the train. Memory began with the picture in his mind of three youths running down the stairs mock-fighting with each other, big, in jackets, their boots grating on the gritty floor. Two had crew-cut hair, blond, the third wore a funny hat. In Nanji’s teachers’ vocabulary: three louts.

  One of the blond-haired louts was obviously the leader – there was a style, a control (or pretence of it) in his gestures; the funny-hatted one, cackling at every opportunity, was a sidekick. The people on the platform instinctively moved away, giving the youths’ antics more room. The effect of this movement was that of forming a loose circle around them. Perhaps the youths became conscious of this circle, the attitude it reflected; they stood up, defi
ant, threatening; the circle loosened some more, now with apprehension. But to no avail, they had smelled blood and they struck, baiting the bystanders with taunts and sarcasm. Only youth can appropriately respond to youth. The victims here were mostly older. Mercifully the attackers kept flitting, prancing away. The youths were some distance from Nanji, there were people between. He was aware of their movements, could hear their grating menace, and he was terribly afraid lest through some magnetism he lead them to his direction; his heart beating wildly, pushing back a prayer because he had stopped believing in prayers. Please, not here, let them stop, let a train come.… The subway tunnels were as dark and endless as a moonless, starless sky. From time to time he swept a glance up and down the platform, pausing briefly to watch the three louts. Once they stopped defiantly in front of a stout lady going home with a package, then in front of a clean-cut young man with a briefcase. They walked up to a young woman, but were less abusive, perhaps because she laughed with them, perhaps because they saw her as closer to their age and background.

  During one of these furtive surveys he saw someone he knew, Esmail, standing at the edge of the platform, looking nervously for a train to come. Esmail, a little over average height, looking taller for the thick-soled shoes, which many Dar men wore for that purpose, and in a very conspicuous beige Kaunda suit, which they had all bought in a frenzy of African patriotism in Dar but now wore proudly in Toronto to set themselves apart. Esmail, also resident at Sixty-nine Rosecliffe, was a man of few words. He would be returning from the bakery where he worked, carrying in the package in his hand, presumably, the meat pies he himself had baked.